When I was about 4 years old, we moved into our first home and I had my own bedroom. My parents bought me a nightlight so that I wouldn’t be scared of the dark. It was so bright that there was no way I could fall asleep with the nightlight on. So instead, I lay in bed under the covers and I’d make shadow monsters on the wall with my hands, scaring myself half to death.
I’m not sure how long I did this – but at some point I had to get rid of the nightlight altogether. I’ve been perfectly at ease falling asleep in total darkness ever since.
When I listen to podcasts, I constantly hear the women are afraid that men they meet might be serial killers- or at minimum might murder them.
I hear many women saying this.
And all I can think is – Really?
I think I know why.
TV, Streaming Services and Podcasts are filled with shows like Dateline, TrueCrime, Law and Order SUV, Dexter and Cold Case. A quick scan of top podcasts is dominated by this genre too.
If you judged society from these, you’d think the chances of getting murdered is fairly high.
I doubt it.
First, TV is not reality.
Second, whenever I am confronted by stats, I do a little bit of research. Nothing I read showed there was a high incidence of murder by serial killers in the US.
Third, I like to ask myself- how many people do I know personally who were murdered by a strange man or were the victim of a serial killer?
I know none.
I wrote about lone gunman shooters a few years ago and another blogger wrote a rebuttal in his blog. He was an ER physician who worked in inner city Philadelphia. He wrote eloquently about the constant gang and drug related shootings in the inner city and how my focus on mass shooters was irrelevant. The high number of shootings, injury and murders in the inner city surpassed all of the mass shooters that dominated the news.
So I’ll concede that if I hadn’t fortunate enough to move from being a white trash ghetto kid to a middle class suburbanite, I’d likely know some people who’d been murdered by teens, gangbangers, criminals etc.
But still, I suspect I might be hard pressed to find any who were victim or a serial killer.
We don’t have to make our own shadow monsters to be scared. It’s pretty easy to get rid of the nightlight, turn off the TV and find a different form of entertainment.